Fresh Art: Steven Shapiro

A monkey sits on a man’s head, grinding his brains into spaghettilike strings. A mouse enters another man’s mouth, undoubtedly on its way to the hunk of Swiss cheese emerging from atop the figure’s head.

With a tinge of self-deprecating humor, these sculptures by Steven Shapiro allowed the artist to express himself after a 2004 car accident left him with a traumatic brain injury and spinal contusion. The accident occurred when he went to buy Valentine’s Day flowers for his wife and encountered an elderly driver going the wrong way in a shopping center’s parking lot. When Shapiro beeped to get him to stop, the driver tried to slam on the brakes but instead hit the gas, sending his vehicle under the front of Shapiro’s minivan. Shapiro was hospitalized and underwent therapy for his resulting spinal, vision, speech, motor-skills and writing problems. It was weeks before he could move his legs and two months before he could return home.

Despite the short-term memory loss, vision difficulties and the fear that he might never again be the person he once was, Shapiro has come a long way from his initial post-crash state. “I was no longer able to walk or talk,” he explains. “I had people taking me to the shower. … Everything I had was taken away and people were telling me what to do.”

Not that he recalls this period clearly. Much of this information has been relayed to him. Even his memories of creating his first post-accident sculptures are fuzzy. “I was heavily medicated,” he says, “and like a 3-year-old in a 40-year-old man’s body.”

"Black Forest"

While in his 20s, Shapiro broke his neck during a wrestling match, leaving him with recurring pain and crushed dreams of pursuing the sport that earned him an athletic scholarship to the University of Buffalo. Anger over yet another severe injury was festering, but medication kept him subdued. “I was trapped inside myself,” the father of two explains. “Ever see someone who’s catatonic, or just moving about and doesn’t talk? I know for a fact that somebody’s in there screaming to get out. I was that person.”

When given therapy putty to increase his hand strength, he began sculpting faces that visually expressed what he couldn’t verbally articulate. Nurses, he says, were disturbed by the sculptures and would toss them into a drawer. “I would just start over again, and that’s what I did constantly,” Shapiro says. “I was obsessed with it.”

Shapiro, who’d previously made whimsical furniture and foam sculptures, created his intricate, often totemlike faces using his hands and a pencil. When his family brought him clay, he became further immersed in the work, eventually making sculptures such as “Black Forest,” a head topped with a winding key and cuckoo-clock-style, pine-cone-shaped weights hanging on chains from each nostril. While sculpting, Shapiro says, “nothing else mattered.”

Encouragement, however, could be elusive. Shapiro recalls making a sculpture during a field trip to a day hospital for brain-injury patients. “While I was working on it, two of the TBI therapists sat down next to me and told me I was wasting my time on these things and that I need to be realistic,” he remembers, “that I could not make a career out of them and that they would take me nowhere.”

Not surprisingly, he’s had reservations about showing his work, and after exhibiting in a now-defunct gallery a few years ago, he packed his sculptures away. When they didn’t sell, he felt responsible for the gallery’s demise. “I was just one person in the place, but that’s how my mind would think then,” he says.

Shapiro, who six months ago underwent a multilevel spinal fusion, began focusing on physical strength and balance exercises. Within six months, he dropped from 235 to 150 pounds and got rid of his cane.Eventually, the clay beckoned. “I always found myself at Michael’s [Arts and Crafts], walking back and forth past the clay, never picking up a box … wanting to, but afraid of what it would bring up,” Shapiro recalls.

It was only after Artistic Productions owner Charlotte Sundquist invited him to exhibit at her Art Night Pompano that he unpacked his sculptures and began working again. He declined her invitation, but then reconsidered. “I started thinking, ‘What am I so afraid of?’ ” he says. “My fear about bringing these out is that the memories I buried with these sculptures come back out. The truth is that they have come out, and I have to deal with them. … A lot of it is the fear, too, the fear of it not being good.”

Sundquist spotted Shapiro’s sculptures at Leche-Vitrines Art Alliance a few years ago. “The artworks I collect typically have a dark side,” she explains. “What was unique, though, was that while the work is a bit macabre, it also seems to have a tongue-in-cheek humor. I think his technique is fantastic, but hearing the story behind the creation of the works makes them all the more fascinating.”